


A Big Heart and an Open Mind

by UchiHime



Series: Tumblr Ficlets [8]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexual Sam Wilson, Asexuality, F/M, If You Squint - Freeform, M/M, Nonbinary Bucky Barnes, Nonbinary Character, Nonbinary Sam Wilson, Polyamory, Sam Wilson-centric, Teenage Sam Wilson, i really don't know how to tag this, it's mostly about teenage sam, like only in the last paragraph minor, the ot4 is very minor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-16
Updated: 2015-06-16
Packaged: 2018-04-04 14:57:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4142052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UchiHime/pseuds/UchiHime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam got his first girlfriend at age fourteen...</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Big Heart and an Open Mind

**Author's Note:**

> So I posted this a month or so ago on my tumblr as just a self-indulgent headcanon because asexual Sam means everything to me and nonbinary Sam holds a special place in my heart. It quickly became my most popular ficlet for the MCU fandom. I've been avoiding cross-posting it here for various reasons, but finally decided to do it. So here ya go.

Sam got his first girlfriend at age fourteen. Her name was Alma and she was the first girl in their grade to wear actual lipstick instead of lip-gloss. Sam spent a lot of time staring at her lips. When he was little, he used wait until his mother put on lipstick and then kiss her lips to get some of the color on his own, by time he was seven he’d been told it was strange to kiss his mother on the lips. So now, he kissed Alma instead. She always tried to wipe the smear of red from his mouth and he always had to hide how much he wished she wouldn’t. 

He liked kissing Alma, not just for the stain of color he briefly obtained, but because her lips were soft and her eyelashes tickled his cheeks and she always smiled to prettily after. He would be content to live the rest of his life making her smile like that and holding her hand in his and hugging her tightly. Her body was so soft and warm and she was taller than him and had long arms that could wrap all the way around him and it felt like she was folding a blanket of security around him.

Once, they were at a party playing truth or dare and Sam’s dare was to let the girls paint his face with makeup and dress him up. All the boys laughed and catcalled when he came out in a little sequined dress with heels and clip-on earrings and Sam had to pretend he hated wearing it for the rest of the night. But really the heat under his skin wasn’t born from embarrassment or shame, it was a fire that ignited inside when he’d first glimpsed himself in the mirror. A fire of joy and contented belonging he hadn’t felt since the babysitter he had when he was eight yelled at him for playing dress up in his sister’s clothes. It’s hard to keep the smile off his face.

A week later, Alma asks him “are you gay?” Sam’s heart starts pounding and there’s an unpleasant heat under his skin and a denial turns brittle on his lips. He’d asked himself that same question the first time Alma had placed his hand on her breast while they were kissing. And he’d asked himself even before that the first time changing out in high school gym class had left him more flustered than changing out in middle school gym class (there were seniors in the high school locker rooms and they had bodies more firm and lithe and dusted with hair in places he’d only ever glimpsed in movies and it made his feel hot and dizzy and he had to force himself to pull his eyes away.) 

Sam’s 14, he knows about sex. He’s sat around watching stolen pornos with his friends and wondering if there was something wrong with him, because it was obvious that the parts of the film he was appreciating was completely different from what his friends were enjoying. And it wasn’t just that he was looking at the guy as much as the girl, but that he was more captivated by the look on her face than her jiggling breast and he loved the sounds he was making more than the movement of his muscles. His friends were all commenting on how they would like to be the one “pounding” her, but Sam felt no desire to touch, looking was more than enough for him.

“Sometimes,” Alma continued, having been talking the whole time Sam was swept away by his thoughts, “I think you like my makeup more than me. You hardly want to kiss me if I’m not wearing lipstick, and I know I’m pretty without it, so the problem has to be you.”

Alma breaks up with him. Sam goes home and his mama feeds him a big slice of caramel cake and cleans the kitchen while waiting for him to be ready to talk about it. When he starts talking, he tells her everything. He tells her about Alma’s lipstick and the sequined dress and the boys in the locker room and what he did and didn’t feel when watching that porno. 

Mama makes herself a cup of coffee and a smaller slice of cake, sits across from him and meets his eyes and says with all the knowledge and wisdom of a mother and a preacher’s wife, “Samuel Thomas Wilson, there is  _nothing_ wrong with you.”

Asexual and nonbinary aren’t something either of them have a word for at the time, but bisexual is a label they know and apply to the situation. “And don’t let anyone tell you there’s something wrong with that either,” mama says. “People are going to say it’s unnatural and a sin, but the truth is, god gave you a big heart and an open mind. He filled you with love and removed the rules that said you couldn’t give it to everyone. He made you special.”

She continued, “You’ll open up to sex in your own time, or maybe you never will. It don’t matter. In the mean time, you stay away from fast lil girls like that Alma. Fourteen is much too young to even be thinking about sex. You make me a grandmother before I’m forty and I’ll skin yo hide, you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Sam replies, and that’s the end of that conversation.

Sam’s nineteen when he first learns that people can be asexual. And it was like a great load had been lifted from his mind. There was a word for it and that meant he wasn’t alone and he wasn’t wrong.

He’s twenty-four when he hears the words nonbinary and genderqueer and he can’t help but smile at how far the world has come and he thinks that somewhere out there, there’s a 14 year old boy who likes to wear his girlfriend’s lipstick and that that boy will always have a word for what he is and will never have to live with the thought that there’s something wrong with him.

Sam’s 37 and he’s helping his boyfriend apply winged eyeliner while their other boyfriend is painting their girlfriend’s toes and remembers the words his mother had said when he admitted to being in a polyamorous relationship with two super-soldiers and an ex-assassin. She’d laughed and said “I always told you, you got a great-big heart filled with love and no rules about who you share it with.”

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr [here.](http://littleredtriskele.tumblr.com)


End file.
